New Chapter

Author Alice Nelson and her husband Danny saw great potential in this Perth home. Their recent renovation is the latest update in a century-long tale of transformation.

- Sarah Pickette

Author Alice Nelson used to write in cramped studios and at noisy public libraries, always dreaming of having a library in her own home. It would be a peaceful space, where her favourite books would be to hand and creativity would come easily. Except it didn’t quite work out like that. When Alice settled into the writing desk built into the steel-framed bay window of her freshly renovated Perth home, she found herself quite daunted. “I now had such a lavish and beautiful room to write in I thought, ‘Wow, the pressure’s really on to write a book worthy of this space.’”

She needn’t have worried. Most of her novel The Children’s House (published by Random House) was composed at her new desk and, upon release, the book was lauded as one of 2018’s best Australian works of fiction. That Alice has such a beautiful space to work in is largely down to the intuitive understanding and skill architect David Hartree brought to this renovation.

“When we met in 2013, David had read everything I’d written and had this real sense of who we were. We found ourselves immediately comfortable with him and how he saw our renovation taking shape,” she says. “It was his idea to engrave lines of poetry into the treads of the sliding ladder in our library.”